I Love My Kids, I Just Don't Feel Bad About Leaving Them to Work

Yesterday I stopped at a coffee shop after dropping my older daughter at preschool. My younger daughter was napping in her stroller while I ordered an iced coffee. A friendly fellow preschool mom I hadn't met before introduced herself and asked me how old the baby was. "Almost 11 weeks," I said, gazing fondly as her chubby cheeks rose and fell with her breath. I excused myself because I had to head to work, and the woman gasped, "Back to work already? At 11 weeks I had barely left the couch."

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This is a common response when people learn I went back to work when my daughter was 2-months-old: a mixture of shock tinged with a little bit of pity (never mind the fact that a full quarter of American women have to go back less than two weeks after giving birth in order for their families to survive, or that my husband never gets asked how long his paternity leave was, though for the record he didn't get a single day). In the upper-middle class circles I travel in, many women take more time than I did. The lawyers I know at big law firms often get six months paid (their average paid leave is over 14 weeks). Tech workers famously get at least four months, if not more. FMLA leave is 12 weeks, though that's unpaid, and anecdotally, many women I know left their full-time jobs entirely and took contract work for a few years when their kids were small.

The truth is, the week before I went back to work, I was excited to return.

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Whenever people express this shock at how relatively brief my leave is, I pantomime guilt. I say something like, "It's really tough but I'm hanging in there!" But the truth is, the week before I went back to work, I was excited to return. My daughter was born in early July, and by September I was bored out of my mind. This was not entirely surprising, as I knew from experience that babies have a very limited repertoire of eating, sleeping 17 hours a day, and pooping, and I am blessed with easy deliveries. I was actually eager to get back to Lenny, the publication which I had helped start from scratch and which I sort of considered my other baby. What's more, I had a new novel coming out—SOULMATES, about a murder at a yoga retreat—and I needed to get on the promotional hustle.

But my younger daughter has the same competent, loving nanny her older sister had, and instead of feeling guilty, I felt profoundly lucky that I could leave her with someone I trusted immensely and that I got to go to a job I loved and that paid me well. I don't think my baby is suffering for not being with her mother 24 hours a day; she seems fat and happy.

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Courtesy Jessica Grose

The caveats here are that my hours are flexible, my office is a 15-minute walk from my apartment, and I can work from home many days a week. I don't want to soft-pedal what an insane luxury all this is. I thank my stars every day that I can be back with my kids in an emergency within minutes and am never given a hard time when I need to take the baby for her monthly visits to the pediatrician. The fact remains: on weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm, I am usually not with my infant.

This is not to say that my return to work is entirely unemotional, or that it's easy for me. My first week back was incredible: filled with adrenaline and glee that I could fall back into the groove of my job without missing a step. But on that Friday it occurred to me that I had to go back and do it again every single week for the foreseeable future. And I felt very, very tired.

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There are moments at the office where I experience a physical yearning for the warmth of my daughter's tiny body against mine.

I have also felt pangs of profound sadness, which is different from guilt. There are moments at the office where I experience a physical yearning for the warmth of my daughter's tiny body against mine. There are other moments where I mourn for how quickly it's all going by. My daughter has already grown out of her newborn clothes, and since we don't plan to have another child, those tiny kimono onesies sit moldering in the back of her drawer, reminding me that I will never hold another just-born baby that I made.

But it's a reality of my life—and the lives of many women—that our professional opportunities heat up at the same time that we have very young children. I could only control so much of the timing of either my babies or my career bumps. We tried to have our second child sooner, but it didn't work out. My novel, SOULMATES, took four years to write, and my excellent publishing house decided when to put it out based on their expertise. That the book came out shortly after the baby is both delightful and difficult, and I'm just trying to take all these things as they come and appreciate them for what they are.

With my kids, that means being as present as possible when I'm with them. Whenever I'm alone with the baby, I play mellow albums that have historically had emotional resonance for me. The one on repeat lately has been Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the romantic lyrics in it are easily repurposed to express my maternal love. I am often holding my babe in the "Bible-black predawn," and it often feels like children are trying to break your heart with their unsullied innocence. But listening to opening lyrics from the song "Jesus, Etc." while rocking my little girl really nails these moments for me:

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